How do you do your backup?

Solution 1:

Lots of suggestions on this question:

Best practices to keep your computer(s) backed up efficiently?

Solution 2:

I think we need to know a little more about your situation to give you a great answer. Things like the following would help:

• Size of backup corpus
• Number of server computers being backed-up
• Duration of backup window
• Retention / archival / destruction concerns

I'm very "old fashioned" in my backup strategies, but I've yet to have any failure to restore. Tape and conservative off-site rotation stategies have served us very well.

My smaller business Customers are receiving full daily backups to tape, which are rotated off-site daily. Most have at least two (2) weeks of daily rotation, and may have additional monthly or quarterly rotations. To expedite restores without requiring someone to go off-site to get media, we're usually using a disk-to-disk-to-tape backup strategy. This works well with the Customers who have under 100GB of data. We've used a combination of LTO, VXA, and SDLT tape technologies in single element drives managed by Backup Exec. The cost of the drive and tapes is higher, initially, than other "lower tech" solutions, but we get rock solid backups and restores (and perform periodic test restores just to be sure).

For larger installations, we usually move to single element autoloaders (LTO) and typically perform daily differential and weekly full backups.

I'll probably be critisized by not being "trendy" and using things like removable hard disk drives, but quality tape technologies have served us very well and have been utterly reliable. LTO, in particular, has been rock solid. We've had a flaky VXA drive now and again, and flaky SDLT tapes, but they've worked well too.